Alison Chabloz

It was a masterful PR stunt. First send out a 30-second teaser and get everyone crying about “The Holocaust” before releasing the full video the next day, with Germania portrayed as a Black Woman.

Much has happened over the past decade in socio-political terms. Yet German industrial metal band, Rammstein, have waited all this time before airing their latest project. In just under 48 hours, their nine-minute YouTube video entitled Deutschland has been viewed over 13 million times.

Provocative art provokes extreme reactions. Don’t I know it… It’s the whole point. As soon as the teaser was released, the all-too-predictable condemnation and whining from Jewish bodies was heard from Berlin to Tel Aviv. The band received an invitation to Dachau – which they probably already visited as schoolkids in the DDR.

And then, the full video, with the very first line of the song:

Du hast viel geweint…

[You cried so much.]

Utterly brilliant. Genius.

Germans don’t have a reputation for crying. On the contrary. But we know who does…

Just a few other notes I wrote down after studying the video clip:

• The opening forest scene refers to the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, when Roman troops were vanquished by Germanic tribes who, so the story goes, were staunchly averse to their peoples becoming Romanised.
• Nuclear warheads during the Konzentrationslager (KL) shots – perhaps a reference to “allegations” that Monowitz was in fact a uranium enrichment plant, hence the need for a Shoah business cover-up?
• Bookburning – Rammstein sued the German government for banning sales of one album, though the ban was eventually overturned.
• The only KL inmate to be actually hung is the one wearing a yellow star (in fact two superimposed yellow triangles). Later, Germania as a Black SS officer is shot in the face by singer Lindemann, dressed as a Communist KL inmate.
• Germania giving birth to a mongrel in a scene half way between a modern day nativity and a makeshift International Red Cross refugee medical tent, complete with livestock. (There also appears to be a split second bestiality scene later on, once the mutt’s gender has been checked out by the cardinal).
• The huge Karl Marx Memorial in Chemnitz, protected by soldiers and a tank, ironically then becoming the target of a Molotov cocktail, courtesy of Antifa.

All in all, the most interesting piece of contemporary art I’ve encountered for quite some time.